by Ann Beattie
At first Lenore loved George because he was untypical, although after she had moved in with him and lived with him for a while she began to see that he was not exceptional but a variation on a type. She is proud of observing that, and she harbors the discovery—her silent response to his low opinion of her. She does not know why he found her attractive—in the beginning he did—because she does not resemble the pretty, articulate young women he likes to invite, with their lovers or girl friends, to their house for the weekend. None of these young women have husbands; when they bring a man with them at all they bring a lover, and they seem happy not to be married. Lenore, too, is happy to be single—not out of conviction that marriage is wrong but because she knows that it would be wrong to be married to George if he thinks she is simple. She thought at first to confront him with what she had overheard, to demand an explanation. But he can weasel out of any corner. At best, she can mildly fluster him, and later he will only blame it on Scotch. Of course she might ask why he has all these women come to visit, why he devotes so little time to her or the children. To that he would say that it was the quality of the time they spent together that mattered, not the quantity. He has already said that, in fact, without being asked. He says things over and over so that she will accept them as truths. And eventually she does. She does not like to think long and hard, and when there is an answer—even his answer—it is usually easier to accept it and go on with things. She goes on with what she has always done: tending the house and the children and George, when he needs her. She likes to bake and she collects art postcards. She is proud of their house, which was bought cheaply and improved by George when he was still interested in that kind of work, and she is happy to have visitors come there, even if she does not admire them or even like them.
Except for teaching a night course in photography at a junior college once a week, George has not worked since he left the university two years ago, after he was denied tenure. She cannot really tell if he is unhappy working so little, because he keeps busy in other ways. He listens to classical music in the morning, slowly sipping herbal teas, and on fair afternoons he lies outdoors in the sun, no matter how cold the day. He takes photographs, and walks alone in the woods. He does errands for her if they need to be done. Sometimes at night he goes to the library or goes to visit friends; he tells her that these people often ask her to come too, but he says she would not like them. This is true—she would not like them. Recently he has done some late-night cooking. He has always kept a journal, and he is a great letter writer. An aunt left him most of her estate, ten thousand dollars, and said in her will that he was the only one who really cared, who took the time, again and again, to write. He had not seen his aunt for five years before she died, but he wrote regularly. Sometimes Lenore finds notes that he has left for her. Once, on the refrigerator, there was a long note suggesting clever Christmas presents for her family that he had thought of while she was out. Last week he scotch-taped a slip of paper to a casserole dish that contained leftover veal stew, saying: “This was delicious.” He does not compliment her verbally, but he likes to let her know that he is pleased.
A few nights ago—the same night they got a call from Julie and Sarah, saying they were coming for a visit—she told him that she wished he would talk more, that he would confide in her.
“Confide what?” he said.
“You always take that attitude,” she said. “You pretend that you have no thoughts. Why does there have to be so much silence?”
“I’m not a professor anymore,” he said. “I don’t have to spend every minute thinking.”
But he loves to talk to the young women. He will talk to them on the phone for as much as an hour; he walks with them through the woods for most of the day when they visit. The lovers the young women bring with them always seem to fall behind; they give up and return to the house to sit and talk to her, or to help with the preparation of the meal, or to play with the children. The young woman and George come back refreshed, ready for another round of conversation at dinner.
A few weeks ago one of the young men said to her, “Why do you let it go on?” They had been talking lightly before that—about the weather, the children—and then, in the kitchen, where he was sitting shelling peas, he put his head on the table and said, barely audibly, “Why do you let it go on?” He did not raise his head, and she stared at him, thinking that she must have imagined his speaking. She was surprised—surprised to have heard it, and surprised that he said nothing after that, which made her doubt that he had spoken.
“Why do I let what go on?” she said.
There was a long silence. “Whatever this sick game is, I don’t want to get involved in it,” he said at last. “It was none of my business to ask. I understand that you don’t want to talk about it.”
“But it’s really cold out there,” she said. “What could happen when it’s freezing out?”
He shook his head, the way George did, to indicate that she was beyond understanding. But she wasn’t stupid, and she knew what might be going on. She had said the right thing, had been on the right track, but she had to say what she felt, which was that nothing very serious could be happening at that moment because they were walking in the woods. There wasn’t even a barn on the property. She knew perfectly well that they were talking.
When George and the young woman had come back, he fixed hot apple juice, into which he trickled rum. Lenore was pleasant, because she was sure of what had not happened; the young man was not, because he did not think as she did. Still at the kitchen table, he ran his thumb across a pea pod as though it were a knife.
This weekend Sarah and Julie are visiting. They came on Friday evening. Sarah was one of George’s students—the one who led the fight to have him rehired. She does not look like a troublemaker; she is pale and pretty, with freckles on her cheeks. She talks too much about the past, and this upsets him, disrupts the peace he has made with himself. She tells him that they fired him because he was “in touch” with everything, that they were afraid of him because he was so in touch. The more she tells him the more he remembers, and then it is necessary for Sarah to say the same things again and again; once she reminds him, he seems to need reassurance—needs to have her voice, to hear her bitterness against the members of the tenure committee. By evening they will both be drunk. Sarah will seem both agitating and consoling, Lenore and Julie and the children will be upstairs, in bed. Lenore suspects that she will not be the only one awake listening to them. She thinks that in spite of Julie’s glazed look she is really very attentive. The night before, when they were all sitting around the fireplace talking, Sarah made a gesture and almost upset her wineglass, but Julie reached for it and stopped it from toppling over. George and Sarah were talking so energetically that they did not notice. Lenore’s eyes met Julie’s as Julie’s hand shot out. Lenore feels that she is like Julie: Julie’s face doesn’t betray emotion, even when she is interested, even when she cares deeply. Being the same kind of person, Lenore can recognize this.
Before Sarah and Julie arrived Friday evening, Lenore asked George if Sarah was his lover.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said. “You think every student is my lover? Is Julie my lover?”
She said, “That wasn’t what I said.”
“Well, if you’re going to be preposterous, go ahead and say that,” he said. “If you think about it long enough, it would make a lot of sense, wouldn’t it?”
He would not answer her question about Sarah. He kept throwing Julie’s name into it. Some other woman might then think that he was protesting too strongly—that Julie really was his lover. She thought no such thing. She also stopped suspecting Sarah, because he wanted that, and it was her habit to oblige him.
He is twenty-one years older than Lenore. On his last birthday he was fifty-five. His daughter from his first marriage (his only marriage; she keeps reminding herself that they are not married, because it often seems that they might as well be) sent him an Irish country h
at. The present made him irritable. He kept putting it on and putting it down hard on his head. “She wants to make me a laughable old man,” he said. “She wants me to put this on and go around like a fool.” He wore the hat all morning, complaining about it, frightening the children. Eventually, to calm him, she said, “She intended nothing.” She said it with finality, her tone so insistent that he listened to her. But having lost his reason for bitterness, he said, “Just because you don’t think doesn’t mean others don’t think.” Is he getting old? She does not want to think of him getting old. In spite of his ulcer, his body is hard. He is tall and handsome, with a thick mustache and a thin black goatee, and there is very little gray in his kinky black hair. He dresses in tight-fitting blue jeans and black turtleneck sweaters in the winter, and old white shirts with the sleeves rolled up in the summer. He pretends not to care about his looks, but he does. He shaves carefully, scraping slowly down each side of his goatee. He orders his soft leather shoes from a store in California. After taking one of his long walks—even if he does it twice a day—he invariably takes a shower. He always looks refreshed, and very rarely admits any insecurity. A few times, at night in bed, he has asked, “Am I still the man of your dreams?” And when she says yes he always laughs, turning it into a joke, as if he didn’t care. She knows he does. He pretends to have no feeling for clothing, but actually he cares so strongly about his turtlenecks and shirts (a few are Italian silk) and shoes that he will have no others. She has noticed that the young women who visit are always vain. When Sarah arrived, she was wearing a beautiful silk scarf, pale as conch shells.
Sitting on the floor on Saturday morning, Lenore watches the fire she has just lit. The baby, tucked in George’s chair, smiles in his sleep, and Lenore thinks what a good companion he would be if only he were an adult. She gets up and goes into the kitchen and tears open a package of yeast and dissolves it, with sugar and salt, in hot water, slushing her fingers through it and shivering because it is so cold in the kitchen. She will bake bread for dinner—there is always a big meal in the early evening when they have guests. But what will she do for the rest of the day? George told the girls the night before that on Saturday they would walk in the woods, but she does not really enjoy hiking, and George will be irritated because of the discussion the night before, and she does not want to aggravate him. “You are unwilling to challenge anyone,” her brother wrote her in a letter that came a few days ago. He has written her for years—all the years she has been with George—asking when she is going to end the relationship. She rarely writes back because she knows that her answers sound too simple. She has a comfortable house. She cooks. She keeps busy and she loves her two children. “It seems unkind to say but,” her brother writes, “but …” It is true; she likes simple things. Her brother, who is a lawyer in Cambridge, cannot understand that.
Lenore rubs her hand down the side of her face and says good morning to Julie and Sarah, who have come downstairs. Sarah does not want orange juice; she already looks refreshed and ready for the day. Lenore pours a glass for Julie. George calls from the hallway, “Ready to roll?” Lenore is surprised that he wants to leave so early. She goes into the living room. George is wearing a denim jacket, his hands in the pockets.
“Morning,” he says to Lenore. “You’re not up for a hike, are you?”
Lenore looks at him, but does not answer. As she stands there, Sarah walks around her and joins George in the hallway and he holds the door open for her. “Let’s walk to the store and get Hershey bars to give us energy for a long hike,” George says to Sarah. They are gone. Lenore finds Julie still in the kitchen, waiting for the water to boil. Julie says that she had a bad night and she is happy not to be going with George and Sarah. Lenore fixes tea for them. Maria sits next to her on the sofa, sipping orange juice. The baby likes company, but Maria is a very private child; she would rather that she and her mother were always alone. She has given up being possessive about her father. Now she gets out a cardboard box and takes out her mother’s collection of postcards, which she arranges on the floor in careful groups. Whenever she looks up, Julie smiles nervously at her; Maria does not smile, and Lenore doesn’t prod her. Lenore goes into the kitchen to punch down the bread, and Maria follows. Maria has recently gotten over chicken pox, and there is a small new scar in the center of her forehead. Instead of looking at Maria’s blue eyes, Lenore lately has found herself focusing on the imperfection.
As Lenore is stretching the loaves onto the cornmeal-covered baking sheet, she hears the rain start. It hits hard on the garage roof.
After a few minutes Julie comes into the kitchen. “They’re caught in this downpour,” Julie says. “If Sarah had left the car keys, I could go get them.”
“Take my car and pick them up,” Lenore says, pointing with her elbow to the keys hanging on a nail near the door.
“But I don’t know where the store is.”
“You must have passed it driving to our house last night. Just go out of the driveway and turn right. It’s along the main road.”
Julie gets her purple sweater and takes the car keys. “I’ll be right back,” she says.
Lenore can sense that she is glad to escape from the house, that she is happy the rain began.
In the living room Lenore turns the pages of a magazine, and Maria mutters a refrain of “Blue, blue, dark blue, green blue,” noticing the color every time it appears. Lenore sips her tea. She puts a Michael Hurley record on George’s stereo. Michael Hurley is good rainy-day music. George has hundreds of records. His students used to love to paw through them. Cleverly, he has never made any attempt to keep up with what is currently popular. Everything is jazz or eclectic: Michael Hurley, Keith Jarrett, Ry Cooder.
Julie comes back. “I couldn’t find them,” she says. She looks as if she expects to be punished.
Lenore is surprised. She is about to say something like “You certainly didn’t look very hard, did you?” but she catches Julie’s eye. She looks young and afraid, and perhaps even a little crazy.
“Well, we tried,” Lenore says.
Julie stands in front of the fire, with her back to Lenore. Lenore knows she is thinking that she is dense—that she does not recognize the implications.
“They might have walked through the woods instead of along the road,” Lenore says. “That’s possible.”
“But they would have gone out to the road to thumb when the rain began, wouldn’t they?”
Perhaps she misunderstood what Julie was thinking. Perhaps it has never occurred to Julie until now what might be going on.
“Maybe they got lost,” Julie says. “Maybe something happened to them.”
“Nothing happened to them,” Lenore says. Julie turns around and Lenore catches that small point of light in her eye again. “Maybe they took shelter under a tree,” she says. “Maybe they’re screwing. How should I know?”
It is not a word Lenore often uses. She usually tries not to think about that at all, but she can sense that Julie is very upset.
“Really?” Julie says. “Don’t you care, Mrs. Anderson?”
Lenore is amused. There’s a switch. All the students call her husband George and her Lenore; now one of them wants to think there’s a real adult here to explain all this to her.
“What am I going to do?” Lenore says. She shrugs. Julie does not answer.
“Would you like me to pour you tea?” Lenore asks.
“Yes,” Julie says. “Please.”
George and Sarah return in the middle of the afternoon. George says that they decided to go on a spree to the big city—it is really a small town he is talking about, but calling it the big city gives him an opportunity to speak ironically. They sat in a restaurant bar, waiting for the rain to stop, George says, and then they thumbed a ride home. “But I’m completely sober,” George says, turning for the first time to Sarah. “What about you?” He is all smiles. Sarah lets him down. She looks embarrassed. Her eyes meet Lenore’s quickly, and jump to Julie. The tw
o girls stare at each other, and Lenore, left with only George to look at, looks at the fire and then gets up to pile on another log.
